The new trait, Feed Saved, has generated significant interest from producers, dairy media, international partners and others. Also, there has been engaged and positive dialogue among U.S. industry partners, the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding (CDCB) and Animal Genomics and Improvement Laboratory (AGIL) scientists. It is truly a milestone mark in dairy genetic improvement.

The pattern of CDCB has been to introduce new traits independently to allow the industry and producers to better understand the behavior of the new trait. Said another way, we observe the individual trait for some time before it is incorporated into the CDCB selection indices.

In that spirit, the CDCB board of directors decided at its January meeting that we will continue to publish Feed Saved as an individual trait for a little while, with no impact for Net Merit and other CDCB indices. We appreciate the input from various groups into this decision, including the CDCB Producer Advisory Committee (PAC) and Genetic Evaluation Methods (GEM) committee, and the National Association of Animal Breeders (NAAB) Dairy Sire Evaluation Committee (DSEC).

Some earlier communications may have signaled that Feed Saved would be incorporated into a Net Merit update in April 2021. There will be no changes to Net Merit in April.

On behalf of the team at CDCB and AGIL, we will continue to work in conjunction with industry partners so that together we can provide the best selection tools to dairy producers.  

This first appeared in the February 2021 CDCB Connection enewsletter.